Word: pleasants
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Putney-type graduate may often surround himself with high school friends (ideally, with a high school girl-friend), go back frequently, and with the slighest excuse, to his old school, and return to Harvard despondent, recalling his pleasant visit, the warmth of his welcome (he forgets the role his present Harvard status plays here) and looking forward to his next trip. He dresses quite as he did for the hayride back then...
Unfortunately, the book contains far too much social relations jargon and too many statistics to make pleasant light reading. In fact, if Casey Stengel's memoirs were to appear written in the plodding, colorless prose of an introductory mathematics textbook, it would still be difficult to find a book as unrevealing of the author's character as A Profile. Virtually all of Pettigrew's exuberance, humor, and fondness for improbable metaphor has been carefully excluded. Yet if scholarship has supplanted lively writing, the scholarship is always topnotch and usually provocative...
Another little girl appears on the screen. She is strolling through a pleasant field. She stoops, picks a daisy, starts plucking its petals while counting, in the fashion of children from time immemorial. "One, two, three . . ." A man's doom-laden voice comes in stronger and stronger, finally drowning out the child's words. The man is count ing backward: "Ten, nine, eight . . ." The countdown ends, and the screen erupts in atomic explosion, followed by the voice of Lyndon Baines Johnson, who says somberly: "These are the stakes: to make a world in which...
...Germans find themselves in the same position as the French, the English, cats, or tobacco," aphorizes Author Leonhardt. "To be hated for the right reasons is not always pleasant, but to be loved for the wrong ones can be downright embarrassing." With that essentially negative prelude out of the way, the West German journalist launches into a wry and gritty explanation of what it is like to be a German today. Leonhardt feels that the Germans are among the world's most unliked peoples, but his apologia gives a tough, fascinatingly qualified answer of yes to the question...
...worldliness, Barzini's is a cry of despair: "The tenacity and the eagerness with which the individual pursues his private interests and defends himself from society, his mistrust of noble ideals and motives, the splendid show, the all-pervading indulgence for man's foibles, make Italian life pleasant and bearable in spite of poverty, tyranny and injustice. They also waste the efforts and the sacrifices of the best Italians and make poverty, tyranny and injustice very difficult to defeat...